Demonstration of neutron identification in neutrino interactions in the MicroBooNE liquid argon time projection chamber
The European Physical Journal C SpringerOpen 84:10 (2024) 1052
Authors:
P Abratenko, O Alterkait, D Andrade Aldana, L Arellano, J Asaadi, A Ashkenazi, S Balasubramanian, B Baller, A Barnard, G Barr, D Barrow, J Barrow, V Basque, J Bateman, O Benevides Rodrigues, S Berkman, A Bhanderi, A Bhat, M Bhattacharya, M Bishai, A Blake, B Bogart, T Bolton, JY Book, K Duffy
Abstract:
A significant challenge in measurements of neutrino oscillations is reconstructing the incoming neutrino energies. While modern fully-active tracking calorimeters such as liquid argon time projection chambers in principle allow the measurement of all final state particles above some detection threshold, undetected neutrons remain a considerable source of missing energy with little to no data constraining their production rates and kinematics. We present the first demonstration of tagging neutrino-induced neutrons in liquid argon time projection chambers using secondary protons emitted from neutron-argon interactions in the MicroBooNE detector. We describe the method developed to identify neutrino-induced neutrons and demonstrate its performance using neutrons produced in muon-neutrino charged current interactions. The method is validated using a small subset of MicroBooNE’s total dataset. The selection yields a sample with 60% of selected tracks corresponding to neutron-induced secondary protons. At this purity, the integrated efficiency is 8.4% for neutrons that produce a detectable proton.
